Rhode PVD > Recent Status Updates

“Charlie reappears, looking exactly how he always looks: tidy, overworked, well dressed, and like he wants to bite my thigh.”

“There is, of course, the misconception that straight men universally love tall, thin women. Being such a woman, I can debunk this. Many men are too insecure to date a tall woman. Many of those who aren’t are assholes looking for a trophy.”

“I watched my friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning.”

Our hero is from PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND! Even tho the book takes place on the west coast, this is stupidly exciting for me

In which our heroine comes gangbusters from the straightest PIV sex ever - missionary position and nobody touches her genitals. “Every point of contact between our bodies was a distinct and separate pleasure. Entirely too soon, they merged into one. Ecstasy rose in me like a tide. I surrendered to it….Hathan, moving above me... Then he shuddered and lay still.”

In which a female alien (who is human in nearly every way) says she seduces male aliens using non consensual methods ““Me? I’d wait until he fell asleep, then strip down and crawl into his sleeping bag.”

Ick! The heroine is pleased when a human male friend acts jealous and possessive. “He said”—Hathan cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, it was in a credible imitation of Fletcher’s American drawl—“‘touch her again and I’ll rip your face off.’” “No kidding,” I said, shocked and a little pleased. “That’s pretty gallant.”

So, this author doesn’t appear to know lgbtq people are a thing. “I knew that male and female bodies communicated in ways we only dimly understood, that an intricate dance of pheromones and subtle kinetic cues took place beneath and around any verbal interaction. I had never known that silent communication to be so powerful. Every time Fletcher spoke to me, every time our eyes met, I felt a giddy rush of heat.”

It’s ok, except extreme side-eyeing this sentence because an (apparently) enforced het culture in which 100% of people marry? Ick “I should not have needed to ask, as he was far too old not to have married.”

“Acting like a young man meant she had to think like one too. Revealing even a whiff of attraction for the owner of Team Eireya would poke holes in the still-thick layer of expectation bias protecting her.” It’s been so long since I read a book in a universe with zero lgbtq people that this assumption the everyone’s straightness keeps kicking me out of the story.

I stand corrected, now we have a black queer woman too. Who is described as such. So, white people are not described as such, only nonwhite people are racially described.

Find it odd that as we meet a bunch of new characters, no one’s race is described except for our hero of Indian extraction. White is so default, he doesn’t even think about anyone else’s race?

24 fluid ounces!

Ugh. A male love interest is given an angsty background by his mom - possibly in her 40s - having early onset dementia. This habit of fictionally harming middle aged women to make young men seem more appealing is commonly used misogyny in novels.

The world building is boring me. A bunch of politics and the past of various characters. Am offput by the alien artifact picking up English in a matter of moments.

It gets worse. The sister who has sacrificed her life to be his volunteer housekeeper and nanny, who has no dating life of her own, is begging him to go out to bars and have fun because he needs some time off.

Also, his kid’s mom abandoned her child.

This is rife with sexism.

The single father hero’s sister apparently gave up her own dreams and life to move a few doors down from him and help him raise his kid. Can you imagine that self sacrifice with a gender reversal? This says things about ideals of womanly behavior that gross me out.

Both characters, one a New Zealander the other an American, used the term “European” to explain a man is white. That’s racist and gross, although I’m guessing from context it’s how New Zealanders’ talk?

Based on the title story and cover art, I was expecting a higher SFF to fantasy ratio.

Still so good! ❤️

This is REALLY GOOD

Too many male characters are all being introduced at the start. It’s too many names mixed in with world building and scene setting. Makes me tear my hair out this early on, I can’t remember all these names or know which I have to remember. Also, only two women, both young, beautiful and underlings in their orgs.

WARNING: The typeface of the print edition is *tiny*. I can read it, but it’s not comfortable. Will buy ebook to finish.

“Being a man ho isn’t something I remember with pride.” UM THATS SLUT SHAMING AND NOT SEX POSITIVE.

““This is why you cannot pay someone to do something like this,” he said quietly. “Consent can be coerced. Hypothetical you says she agrees to have her arm broken in exchange for money to feed her children. But is that really consent if your only other choice is the sale of your body?”
This summarizes the entire point of SFF novel Docile quickly and easily

The hero keeps touching the heroine intimately without asking first, and it makes me flinch every time: “He had to touch her. He walked up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, and nuzzled her cheek. She turned her face up to his with a surprised, wide-eyed glance. He dropped a kiss on her lips.”

It’s too dark for me right now. So I’m abandoning and will return another time

Sexist ageism: “Despite the glints of gray in her golden hair, Cordelia was an impressive figure, with an imposing, authoritative air” despite gray...WTF?

Ewww. A woman is getting up from a seated position and a man she barely knows puts his hand at the small of her back “He’d touched her mostly to indulge himself in the pleasure of it”

Two women separately have complained about being called “ma’am” because they are not “old ladies” and that’s so damn ageist as well as being the infuriating reason men call adult women “Miss” these days. Can we just not diminish ourselves and girlie ourselves butinstead be proud of being ADULT WOMEN?